Chapter 5
5.
Despite Bill’s advice, and although Tom cautions against letting things go unsaid for too long, Ginny and Luna decide, somehow, without saying anything at all, not to discuss it.
It.
The Incident.
At first, that’s a relief. It’s almost like it never even happened! Things can be as they were before, without Ginny going and… and…
Problem: even after a week, they’re not talking about it, but Ginny can’t stop thinking about it. Kissing Luna—like, Merlin's nips, she did that? And since Luna's not said anything, does that mean she hated it? Or hates Ginny? Or maybe—maybe she thinks she imagined it. It all happened so fast. Maybe Ginny imagined it. Maybe she never kissed Luna—she doesn’t have any other memories of kissing people to compare it to, to confirm that it was real, and trying to recall the feeling invariably leaves her flushing as she pulls her fingers back from where she's caught herself tracing her lips. Again. So maybe she just… dreamed it. But… if she’s not actually kissed Luna… that’s almost as bad as having kissed her, isn’t it? Because if she hasn’t kissed Luna, she would very much like to, but—if she has—
She would very much like to, but.
She doesn’t kiss Luna. Instead, they sneak back into the potion’s studio, every time Ginny can get away. They don’t even have to sneak, really. Xenophilius, when he is home, is usually in meetings with a bunch of other mad people down in the room beside the press, and pauses the conversation only long enough to kiss the crown of Luna’s fair hair when they come in.
The fact that she's jealous of Luna's dad being so welcome to do that is all sorts of upsetting. Honestly. Ew.
“Those are Daddy’s most regular contributors. Aside from me, of course,” Luna says as they climb the stairs, mistaking how Ginny's been so determined not to look at Xeno as curiosity about the gathering.
“Your dad prints your writing?”
God, what a shit question—isn’t that the sort of thing she should already know about her best friend, who also happens to be the girl she fancies? Tom would know, if he were in Ginny’s place.
“Daddy believes that anyone with a will and a well-enough written article should have the chance to have their voice heard,” Luna says. “The Daily Prophet is out to turn a profit, as they say. My Uncle has a bone to pick with the Prophe—”
She pauses on the landing on the third floor, a little hallway leading off to a few more doors. Ginny leans to glance past her, but there's nothing there. Oh—Ginny tries to think of something clever to say about the Prophet, but her mind, of course, immediately turns to word soup, so she just takes an extra step forward, brushing up against Luna's back.
Luna doesn't even jump, just starts up the next bend of the stairs, continuing on like nothing happened. Ginny has to do that sometimes. Always has—at least since Luna's mum died. And once you realize something like that, you just do it, don't you?
"You like to write as well, no?” Luna asks, drawing the key she keeps on a string around her neck out to open the door of the workshop on the top floor. Ginny hasn't figured out why she locks it sometimes; Xeno won't go in, and who else would come up? “You were writing in that book in the orchard the other day, and you’ve got it now.”
The diary suddenly feels like lead in the niffler pouch of her pullover. She’s made sure to take Tom everywhere with her, since when she left him alone at home after The Incident he’d admitted to being a bit nervous without Ginny there to protect him, considering what Fred and George get up to in the house, and the thought of Tom being scared is just horrible.
"Oh, that," she says, wincing at the inadequacy: she's as bad as Ron, sometimes. “It’s just a, a diary, I guess. I don’t know about… stories. Articles.”
“I think you’d be good at it. You should give it a try. Write something about the Ministry school; you always have stories. I think you could write something that Daddy would publish.”
Except who would want to read those stories? She writes them for Tom, sure, but that’s just to give him something new in his stagnant prison, while most people have the whole wide world. And she’s fairly certain that half the time Tom is only humoring her. He is always interested in things beyond her normal, ordinary life—
That’s what’s got her coming back to Luna’s. Once he'd thought about it, Tom encouraged her to try some simple potions, suggesting which might be easy enough to start with among the books Luna’s mother left behind. They’re limited by what ingredients have kept over the last five years, of course, and what is readily available from the gardens and woods around Ottery St Catchpole.
Xenophilius, Luna says, seems to prefer to believe she uses the space for nothing more than making soaps, so they make some of those, too, for his peace of mind. Mum finds it so delightful when Ginny leaves some that smell of honey and wildflowers and Luna, most of all, in the bathroom. It's horrible.
The potion they try that day, like about half the potions they attempt, turns to sickening sludge in the bottom of the re-polished cauldron. Luna always shrugs when something goes wrong, turning back to her mother's books. It's like she doesn't even care whether what they try turns out or not. But when Ginny tells Tom about it he always has some suggestion for what to change, to try again—
And Ginny isn’t always careful. Especially around Luna, who fills her lunch with butterfly wings that beat the words right out of her mouth. And when Ginny comes running from the Burrow after long hours discussing the basics of potions with Tom at school, the day after, and her heart does that little turn, seeing Luna knotting grass into a long cord already wound several times around her wrist, she can't help but launch in right where she and Tom had left off, and only catches up several seconds after hearing herself say, “—and Tom thinks maybe we’ve got blueberries instead of blackthorn, and blueberries really don’t—”
“Who’s Tom?” Luna asks in the space that follows.
“Oh,” Ginny says, flushing. “Um…”
“You’ve mentioned him before, though I don’t think you mean to. Is he someone who goes to the Ministry school?”
“Yes,” Ginny says, leaping on the excuse, the easy lie—but…
It feels wrong, lying to Luna, as wrong as it does to lie to Tom, though maybe not for the same reason.
“Well, sort of,” she amends. “I mean, I talk to him there, sometimes.”
That, at least, is the truth—when she’s not dozing through lessons, she writes Tom. She learns a hundred times more interesting things from him than the teachers.
Luna focuses on the grass cord for a moment, tying it off. Then she reaches out and takes Ginny’s hand, wrapping her work around Ginny’s wrist as she unwinds it from her own. “Blueberries instead of blackthorn,” she says thoughtfully. “In that case, I suppose we might want to check what is in the kitchen. I was hoping to make some blueberry jelly, but I don’t think the blackthorn I harvested will be very good for that.”
Cord fastened, she uses Ginny’s hand to pull herself up, not bothering to shake the tufts of grass sticking to the patchwork skirt she’s wearing as she turns towards home. Ginny’s skin feels almost uncomfortably hot where Luna’s fingers had wrapped around her, and the grass is itchy. It's not bad—it's real, and Ginny's mind is doing counter-anti-arithmancy trying to compare the memory to the feeling of her lips—
Christ, Ginny, just—just kiss her, just say something, just—
They each take a handful of round little black berries and count down—three, two, one—before popping them into their mouths. A shock of bitterness makes Ginny gag. They really ought to have noticed, before they brewed the potion that they were working with the wrong berry—they don't even look that much alike, as Luna points out; sloes are just round little balls, and the wrong color. Tom is always urging her to pay more attention to her surroundings. It's just, when Ginny is with Luna, it’s so difficult to think straight. And Luna’s brilliant, but Ginny doubts her mind ever thinks about anything straight. It’s what makes her so interesting, isn’t it?
They climb to the top floor once again—pausing first so Luna can put a blanket over her dad, who’s sprawled out across the sofa in his workspace with a book on his chest and several more perched on the cushion by his elbow and his foot dangerously close to a particularly precarious stack, snoring through his gaping mouth—and they start their potion once again.
This time the color lightens when they add the berries, the first sign of some sort of magic. But of course it does: Tom isn’t just interested in potions, he’s proven to Ginny that he’s bloody brilliant, so even for brews like they’ve been making that Tom’s commented are really only the subtlest bit of magic at all, he has all sorts of little tidbits of information to improve them.
And regardless of how sour the berries had tasted, the smell the potion produces when they add them is fantastic. Ginny feels the tension she didn’t even know she was carrying in her shoulders ease, and has to blink away the urge to curl up in the sunlight and take a nap like Xeno is.
“There are potions that can be effective by scent alone,” Luna says, flipping through one of her mother’s books with her free hand to point out an example to Ginny. “But Mummy said for most people, you’re better off just fixing a cuppa, since you can drink your tea, too. She always said that sometimes the potions that smell the best have the most unpredictable results if you drink them, but people keep making them because the smell makes them think they must be good. And if they think they’re good, any changes they notice must be from the potions, even if it’s not really responsible.”
“The placebo effect,” Ginny says brightly. She’d asked Percy to explain that, not wanting to admit to Tom that she didn’t know. It's a fairly straightforward concept, she'd just never heard of it before. And she's glad she didn't ask Tom, because Percy had been so surprised she didn't know.
“To some extent,” Luna agrees. She peers down into the brew. Now the green of the pine needles the potion started with is really coming through, turning it a rich viridian, but the smell is like when Mum has a pie cooling and the boys are racing through their meals trying to get to it sooner. Luna must be satisfied, because she goes on: “I’ve not made this one in years, I’m not sure what to look out for. Is there a reason you wanted to brew it?”
She sets the stirring rod aside. Her hair is up today. A bead of the steam condensed on her brow glints like a snitch as it slips down her cheek and vanishes into the collar of her shirt.
“Um,” says Ginny. “Well, Tom said it sounded like one that might be easy to test out, to see if it works or not.”
It’s a potion that the notes say will help people dream about what they want, after all. You just take a sip and focus on what you want to dream about right before bed. Fairly straightforward.
Luna peers over at Ginny, her eyes narrowing in thought. “You’ve talked to him quite a lot about this,” she observes.
“He’s, he’s really good at potions. And—everything, really.” She can feel her face heating up, talking about Tom—to Luna, of all people! “He knows a lot about magic.”
“Is he… a Hogwarts student, already, then?” Luna asks. “Or a graduate? You said you talk to him at the Ministry…”
“He’s sixteen,” Ginny says. Pauses. “Sort of. He’s— It’s complicated.”
Luna blinks slowly at her. She looks down at the potion, and, after a moment, leans down to blow across the surface. She’s amazing at just looking at potions and knowing what they need, no matter what she says; it turns an even darker green, seeming to shimmer.
“If you don’t want me to tell me about him, you don’t have to, Ginny,” she says, straightening back up. “But it sounds like he’s your friend, so I’m curious.”
“I mean, I don’t… It’s not exactly that I don’t want…”
But that’s a lie: she doesn’t want to tell Luna, and isn't that horrible? It’s not that she’s afraid of the danger. Tom says he trusts her judgment of people, and she trusts Tom, and she trusts Luna. She’s only keeping him from Luna because… because she’s selfish. Because she wants to keep Tom all to herself. Tom is already trapped inside a book, at the mercy of whoever takes hold of him, and she’s taking advantage of that. He asked her to introduce him, and she’s so, so selfish—
“Okay,” Ginny says, her voice sounding unfamiliar. Small. “Okay, I’ll tell you, just… don’t be weird about it, okay?”
Luna turns and stares at her blankly. Oh, Merlin; what would it take for Ginny not to put her foot in her mouth for once? “I mean, just don’t go telling anyone, okay?” Ginny rushes on. “They won’t… understand.”
“Ginny,” Luna says after a long moment, her voice quiet, too. Soft. Gentle. “Who am I going to tell?”
She’s so matter-of-fact about it. Xenophilius isn’t exactly the type of adult to go to if you need to talk about something serious, and Luna would never betray Ginny by talking to Mum. The only person outside of their two families and the Quibbler’s contributors Ginny's ever seen Luna choose to talk to is Cedric Diggory, who lives on the other side of the woods, though she must have talked to thousands of people, traveling around the world with her father.
“Okay,” Ginny says again, but it’s hard to force her hands into the kangaroo pocket of her pullover. Come on. She trusts them. Doesn’t she? Neither will abandon her if they don’t get along. Or if they do. And—Merlin, it’s an ugly, wretched thought, but the diary is Ginny’s now, after all.
Her arms are as stiff as a muggle marionette's as she draws it out. “This,” she says, “is Tom.”
Luna’s eyes take in the worn black leather, and her eyebrows push together. She begins to reach for the diary, but despite herself, Ginny flinches back. Luna stills.
“Your journal?” she asks. “I’ve seen you writing in it before.”
“It’s not just a journal. Tom, he’s…”
But there aren’t really words to encompass all that he is, at least not words Ginny will be able to say without sounding trite. She looks around for a surface to prop the diary on, well away from the flames under the cauldron, and retrieves the bent quill and watery ink from the pocket of her cutoffs.
Tom, she writes as she flips it open on the table, right to the middle. She's usually quite charming when she writes in the middle. Luna’s here.
The ink settles into the paper, faint and grey and drying into nothingness. When Tom replies, of course, his neat print is solid black.
Hello, Luna Lovegood. Ginny’s told me so much about you.
“A two-way charm?” Luna asks.
“No, no. Tom’s not—I mean, he hasn’t got a body. He’s a memory. He’s been trapped in his diary from Hogwarts. For fifty years, he’d said.”
“Fifty years?” Luna looks back down at the book. “That’s… older than Daddy.”
“He’s still just a teenager,” Ginny assures her. “He says he will be as long as he’s trapped there… it’s awful to think about actually. He’s been all alone…”
“I don’t suppose you’ve looked into missing person reports from the forties…”
“Oh, Tom didn’t go missing,” Ginny says. “At least, not back then. He’s just a memory. The real Tom—the original one, I mean—still wrote for years after Tom first, uh, you know, realized he existed, and he says it wasn’t really so bad back then. What he wrote about he could sort of remember, you know, cause it was him, even if it wasn’t. Then he went traveling after the war and left the diary with a friend to hold onto it, but he wasn’t sure if he’d ever come back… And then Tom spent forty-something years on a bookshelf, probably, and got forgotten about and must have gotten mixed up with some books to be sold, and then he got mixed in with Ron’s school things last year. Mum thought he’d just make a good notebook or something, cheaper than loose parchment, but Ron thought a diary would be too girly, and left him with me.”
The black ink is slowly fading away, Tom’s greeting unanswered. Hastily Ginny scribbles another message: I’m telling Luna about you.
Only the good, I hope.
That’s all there is.
“How long have you been speaking to him?” Luna asks.
“Almost a year, now,” Ginny says. “He’s… it’s been really lonely at the Burrow, you know? But since I have Tom…”
“You always have a friend around.”
Ginny shifts uncomfortably, reminded of how selfish she’s been. She's always had a friend, but Tom? It's not as though he's had a choice. He could've been picked up by anyone, and he got stuck with her. Not even a witch yet, stuck out in the least magical arse end of nowhere that anyone could find in the UK. “We think we’ll try to look up what happened to him, once we’re at Hogwarts,” she says. “He says he wanted to be a teacher, but my brothers have never mentioned a Professor Riddle, or anything—which is sad, because he’d be a really good teacher. He is a really good teacher. He’s told me loads about potions and things, and—”
But Tom’s written back again, and she’s distracted reading it. Were the berries wrong? he asks them. If not, it may have had to do with the freshness of the pine needles. If there is not enough water in them, they may have burned.
You were right, Ginny replies. She glances at the potion again, and at Luna, before replying. We did it all up from scratch again and it’s turned dark green and smells really good.
A simple enough mistake to make, and to learn from. As you have Miss Lovegood there with you now, would you mind if I asked a few questions?
Ginny glances at Luna, who is peering down at the book. She tilts her head. “About the potions?” she asks. Ginny pens it down for her.
Foremost. However, I am mainly curious about how you have come to learn to brew without a wand. Did your mother brew wandlessly as well?
Ginny’s breath catches as she reads. She hadn’t expected Tom to be so direct—she always feels quite awkward asking about Luna’s mum, which she has told Tom before. But Luna, as usual, seems unbothered, and seriously considers the question.
Ginny, taking a deep breath, holds out the quill to her. Luna frowns again, searching Ginny’s eyes for something, and Ginny hopes she sees that Ginny is trying to be good when selfishness makes it so hard. Their hands brush as Luna accepts the quill. She runs her fingers along the well-worn barbs and dips it into the ink.
My mother
She stops, frowning down at her hand.
“Are you alright?” Ginny asks.
“How long have you been writing in this book?”
“Almost a year now. Why?”
“Writing in it feels… I don’t know how to describe it. A bit like you.”
“How do you mean?”
But Luna doesn’t answer. She must decide it’s not a bad thing, whatever she felt. She’s very empathetic, Ginny’s told Tom that, so maybe she's picking up on Ginny's nerves. Or maybe she just finds it odd to write in what she thought was Ginny’s journal. Either way, she re-inks the quill and finishes writing:
taught me to brew things she knew I would be capable of. She was far more accomplished in complex brews than I can ever hope to become. She brewed those which required it with a wand. It was damaged in the accident.
Ginny’s eyes flick to the wand resting on the windowsill, blackened beyond use.
She must have been very accomplished indeed, to teach a child so young. And you must have some talent, to manage thus far on your own.
She was, Luna replies, and then she passes the quill back to Ginny.
“He was right,” she says. “This potion will be simple enough to test. We should finish it.”
Ginny tries to hide her frown. While it is a relief, in a way, that Luna… respects that Tom is her friend, now that they’ve started talking to him, it feels rude just to go back to brewing like he’s not even there at all. “Alright,” she says reluctantly.
“Why don’t you ask him if he has any opinions on the effectiveness of elderflower?” Luna suggests. “After all, this is a potion to shape dreams.”